Section: Application Domains

Interactive Simulation of Medical Procedures

Medical simulation has been a very active research field for the past ten years. The ultimate goal is to provide medical students with realistic simulators that react like actual human patients.

One of the most challenging task in medical simulation is to realistically model soft organs and tissues, and their interaction with surgical instruments, requiring real-time solutions to complex problems such as physical modeling and collision detection.

We continue our contribution to the development of medical simulators. We have recently concentrated our effort on the design of a cataract surgery simulator in ophthalmology. The first step of the operation (namely capsulhorexis) has been modeled. We now have a realistic real-time behavior of the capsule and its interaction with the surgical instruments. The next step will be the realistic modeling of the lens. A first approach based on finite-element modeling has been investigated. It allows for an accurate simulation of the phacoemusification procedure (breaking of the lens).

We worked with Magritt project at INRIA on the realistic simulation of brain aneurysm embolization. In our ARC project, named "simple", we shared our knowledge about medical image processing for Magritt and physically based simulation for Alcove. We had some good results [29] which are milestones for proposing the simulation as a planning tool for this particular application in the near future.

We made a strong effort in the development of SOFA, our flexible open-framework dedicated to real-time simulations. This development is a joint-effort between Alcove, Asclepios (INRIA Sophia), Evasion (INRIA Grenoble) and the Sim group@CIMIT (Boston, USA). Our purpose is also to collaborate with other teams around the world involved in simulation.